There is only one word for
San Francisco. It's an affront. Last Christmas Day I walked
out from the tourist hotel I was staying in at the top of
Market St and could have fired a gun down that usually
thronged thoroughfare and hit nobody.

That is if you're
inclined to think that 183 homeless people are nobody.
That's how many homeless people died on the streets of SF
during 1999 and that's approximately how many I saw on
Market St that Christmas Day with the veil of workers,
shoppers and tourists removed.

My enduring image of SF is
of the gilded City Hall (millions spent on its architecture
award-winning refurbishment) in the background as an old man
crawled out from his shelter between two supermarket
trolleys. With utter dignity he found something to use to
pick up a human turd left on the pavement beside his home,
depositing it in the gutter.

"Some people are worse than
animals", he said.

Well, hopefully many of those people
just got voted off the Board of Supervisors and some way
will be found to provide what surely is a far more basic
human need than the tons of gold leaf plastered on City
Hall. A group of artist activists this week plastered
silhouettes of the dead homeless around the city with the
words "Preventable Death" and a number, in an attempt to
shake people out of the inure-ty they put themselves into to
cope with the disparity of what they see on the
streets.

So it was that I decided this Christmas to leave
the golden brick road and head for the Emerald City - that
"rain-soaked village midway between San Francisco and
Alaska", as Alistair Cooke once called Seattle. I caught
Amtrak's Coastal Starlight at 10pm Christmas Eve eve and
woke up next day as dawn touched magical Mt Shasta.

There
was a light dusting of white on the ground which became
steadily thicker as we got further north into Oregon until,
for about 3 hours, we were travelling through a continuous
Christmas card of pine trees in the snow. You have to hand
it to Whomever upstairs - it was a stroke of absolute
genius to take the most common chemical on earth and add a
drop of temperature to create something so simple and
elegant and pristine that it stirs the soul of everyone -
naughty and nice - on the planet.

By the time darkness
fell a new kind of Christmas card appeared - Christmas
lights. Whole subdivisions, shopping malls and just
individual homes - large and small - were outlined in
lights or festooned with stars and deer and anything at all
that caught the decorator's fancy. I ventured to ask my
dinner companions - a retired couple returning to Seattle
after visiting friends in Portland - if there was a power
shortage in Washington state. "There will be if you
Californians keep taking it from us", the wife replied,
adding that their power bill had just doubled.

Dubbed "the
grid that stole Christmas" by SF media, Pacific Gas and
Electric had to resort to getting the federal government to
order other states to sell power cheaply to California when
the local energy wholesale market went through the roof.
Stories of an impending ban on Christmas lights had PG&E
rushing to put on radio ads about the number of porch lights
that go on to welcome people home and the miles of gas
pipeline it maintains just so they can have a hot shower
when they get inside.

Caught between the tag end of
regulated retail pricing, a shortage of generating plant
and a completely free market in wholesale electricity and
gas, PG&E staggers from day to day racking up billions of
dollars in debt. If Standard and Poors disses its credit
rating because of that, the utility company will be
bankrupted before the end of the year. This year. Y2K.

But
hey, it's Christmas Day now and I'm in Seattle, where they
thoughtfully supply a hazmat container for syringe disposal
in the "family restroom" on the Washington State Ferries
that ply Puget Sound. On the bus going from the ferry
terminal back to my twee B&B in the University District, I
overhear street people comparing the Christmas dinners
supplied by different charities. "They're serving now,"
said one of the place he'd just come from, "but they wanted
us to listen to a church service. No way."

As the bus goes
past "Bozotronics" - which sounds like just my kind of hi fi
store - I glance at a photo in today's Seattle Times. It
shows the southbound Coastal Starlight going past a pile of
kindling. It seems that late Saturday, a chartered Amtrak
train carrying sports fans home to Portland slammed into a
house that was being moved by a contractor. He'd checked for
scheduled trains so thought he was safe.

The event was
much to everyone's surprise, as you can well imagine. But
the story just gets more interesting. The house had been
bought at a charity auction for $580 by a young couple who
then didn't claim it because it would have cost $20,000 to
move it. The moving contractor then offered to take the
house off the original owners' property for free if he could
live in it or sell it, which is what he was doing at the
time of the accident - while under the influence and with
his licence suspended, so the paper says.

Now here's the
spooky part - the charity auction had been held to benefit
the daughter of a woman killed in an air crash earlier in
the year. Could it be that the ghost of mother past looked
down and saw a rascal about to profit handsomely from a
charitable act not meant for him at all and sent a posse of
Seahawks fans out to get him? Whatever. Nobody was hurt much
and the contractor was arrested then sent back to help in
the clean-up.

Ah, Seattle. Not much different from SF I
guess except that it's cold and damp and it was too overcast
to see the partial eclipse of the sun on Christmas morning.
And yes, the B&B had some singularly depressing Leonard
Cohen playing at breakfast. ("Don't be scared", the young
manager in his horn rims and black outfit said, when I
commented on it.) But there's snow-capped mountains on
every horizon to balance the deep, flat, black waters of
the Sound. And something in the air.

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